I, the Jury

He was all eagerness and animation, this young man deep in conversation in a hotel lobby. “The aesthetics of these films are so different,” he insisted to his friends, eyes hot with passion. “I can’t imagine being on the jury at this festival.”

I had to smile as I walked past, not only because the speaker reminded me of myself a couple of decades back, but also because I happened to be one of the seven members of the jury at the 20th Montreal World Film Festival. And, in fact, the experience was as the young man imagined, a situation hard to visualize in the abstract that became more surprising, more exhausting and more gratifying than almost any cinematic encounter I could remember.

It was how closed off and unknowable to outsiders the jury life was that made me curious to participate for almost as long as I’d realized the position existed. And my interest in juries as forces for good intensified after Cannes in 1993 when its chairman, the late Louis Malle engineered the decision most people wanted but dared not dream of: a rare splitting of the Palme d’Or between Jane Campion’s “The Piano” and Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine.”

Understandably pleased with what he had accomplished, Malle came over to chat with a group of American journalists at the closing-night party. “I’m as proud of having done this,” he said, satisfaction all over his face, “as anything in my career.”

Of course, through the years I’d heard all kinds of other stories about how these panels operated, juicier tales that made jury life seem well suited for a series on the Fox network. Rumors of backbiting, rivalries and jealousy were everywhere, as were festivals where the films hadn’t shown up, where jurors needed bodyguards or played tennis instead of seeing the movies, where a juror had insisted on taking her unruly cat to all the screenings, only to have it invariably escape into the theater.

Sometimes factionalism on juries had become so extreme that a film won because both sides detested it equally. Berlin before glasnost, with its wall dividing the city between the West and the Soviet Bloc, had been a natural setting for divisiveness. One jury member remembered a Russian actress who announced, before a single film had been screened, that voting for anything from the United States or Canada was out of the question for her.

Especially good for trouble was the late German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Once, in a particularly anarchistic mood, he determined what the worst film in the Berlin competition was and insisted it win the Golden Bear, reducing an American actress on the jury to tears of frustration and rage.

Perhaps my favorite jury tale came from Donald Ritchie, the doyen of Western writers on Japanese film, who described how you indicate preference in a country where expressing strong opinions is frowned on: “On the first round everyone goes around the table mentioning all the entries and saying, ‘These are all good films.’ On the second round, you do the same thing and, if there is a film you favor, you name it at the end and say, ‘This, this also is a good film.’ ”

Since the kind of jury experience I’d have would depend on my fellow panel members, I was naturally curious as to who they were. The redoubtable Jeanne Moreau was to be the chairman, to be joined by another award-winning actress, Spain’s Assumpta Serna, and a former critic, Guglielmo Biraghi from Italy, who had also run both the Taormina and Venice festivals in his country.

Two members were directors: Cuba’s Humberto Solas, whose “Lucia” was a classic of Latin American cinema, and Hungary’s Judit Elek, whose “To Speak the Unspeakable--The Message of Elie Wiesel” had been well received at Cannes. Finally there was French Canadian producer Denis Heroux, with films like “Atlantic City” and “Quest for Fire” to his credit.

It was an impressive group. Maybe even too impressive. Suddenly I realized I was the only native English speaker on the entire panel. How would we communicate, I wondered, and other worries, each more irrational than the last, soon followed.

Would I be faced with a cabal of aesthetic zealots whose taste would run to the obscure and unwatchable? Would I in reaction turn into some kind of zealous American chauvinist, insisting on the plastic qualities of Sylvester Stallone’s work? Would I get a late-night phone call from Jack Valenti, pleading with me to stand by the flag? Clearly this jury business might be more complicated than I thought.

Although Montreal is one of the world’s larger film festivals, showing hundreds of films during its 12-day span, only 21 of those would be in the official competition, and when I got a look at the list of titles, a completely different set of concerns attacked my mind.

While the competition films came from 16 countries (including Albania, India, Iran, Israel, Romania, Sweden and South Korea), most of them were unknown to me, made by directors I was unfamiliar with or both. What if the unthinkable happened and I couldn’t find anything to get passionate about? Or what if everyone loved everything I hated and vice versa? Would I be subject to cutting remarks in obscure languages? Or worse?

Once I arrived in Montreal and made my way through the hefty 400-page official program, I began to realize that the festival’s international quality, both in and out of competition, was the essence of its identity. It is also critical to how the World Film Festival defines itself in relation to its rival some 300 miles down Highway 401, the Toronto International Film Festival.

Though their dates are similar (Toronto began three days after Montreal ended) and they often tried to snare the same films, the festivals say they don’t really compete with each other, and while that sounds like publicity pablum, the claim contains a core of truth. Because near as they are geographically, Montreal and Toronto can be seen as representing the yin and yang of today’s film world.

Toronto shows its share of obscure and worthwhile films, but its ethos, its current claim to celebrity, is that it’s the place to go if you want to be the first on your block to see what’s going to be hot in the next few months. As the movie business changed and it became clear that lucrative acquisition deals could be made on smaller pictures, Toronto became Hype Central, the place where films were seen, the heat created and the handshakes given.

Even French Canadian films made in the province of Quebec, such as Robert Lepage’s “Le Confessional” and Jean-Claude Lauzon’s “Leolo,” have premiered at Toronto’s event for commercial reasons. As Piers Handling, director of the Toronto festival, told Maclean’s, the Canadian newsmagazine, his city is “friendly, safe and Anglophone--the Americans don’t feel like they are going to a foreign city, which is important to them.”

Montreal, by contrast, exists to show films that not only won’t get hot but also may in fact never be so much as seen elsewhere. Serge Losique, who founded the event and still runs it, wrote in the current program that “the Festival has become an obligatory dose of oxygen for those who are interested in what is being made in foreign cinemas.” Says French actor Gerard Depardieu, who visited in 1995: “It’s what I call Cinema Planet.” For cinephiles like director Brian De Palma, who comes year after year to sample the wide selection, no festival can replace its breadth and noncommercial environment.

In some ways typical of Montreal fare (though paradoxically scheduled for Toronto as well), was something called “Seven Servants,” a hopelessly absurd film starring Anthony Quinn as acaftan-clad tycoon searching for meaning in his life. He pays a man $10,000 to put a finger in his ear and keep it there 24 hours a day for 10 days. Then he pays another man to do the same for the other ear, a third man to do the same for one nostril, a fourth for the second. Most of the film consists of these five people moving in tandem across lawns and floors like some enormous crab. Really.

This international mix has been extremely popular with Montreal’s citizens (annual attendance in the 400,000 range allows the event to call itself the largest publicly attended film festival in the Western world). More than that, it seems fair to speculate that on a psychological level, the city probably had no choice about the kind of event it hosted.

Montreal is a bilingual metropolis in the only province with a Francophone majority, and its obsession with what the local French press calls “la crise linguistic” reaches a level of intensity difficult for outsiders to credit. So this city’s festival could no more bend over backward to make English speakers feel at home than Toronto’s could insist on Chinese subtitles for all its films.

Like many of the world’s intractable crises, the battle between English and French in Montreal and Quebec has a long and complex history. Concerned that French is disappearing under the inexorable tide of worldwide English hegemony, the province’s ruling Parti Quebecois has pushed a series of laws to redress the balance, like the current one that says all English commercial signs must be either half the size or half as numerous as their French counterparts.

(Sometimes this determination to protect national character can go to extreme lengths. In an episode the local press dubbed “Matzogate,” kosher for Passover products imported from the United States with English-only labels were pulled from Quebec shelves only two weeks before the holiday last March. When a compromise was recently reached between the government and the Jewish community, the Gazette, the city’s only English language newspaper, made “Passover Products Cleared” the four-column banner across the top of Page 1.)

Ever since last October’s province-wide referendum on the possibility of independence for Quebec ended in almost a dead heat (everyone in the city knows the 50.6% “no” versus 49.4% “yes” figures), the situation has gotten, if possible, worse, with a new militancy on the part of English speakers leading to newspaper headlines about “the summer of the angry Anglo.”

One of the results of these language battles is a film festival that has been called more determinedly French than Cannes. When director Lina Wertmuller, admitting that her English was abominable and her French a disgrace, asked the audience which language she should use to introduce her film, all the voices boomed, “Francaise.” Said one journalist, upset about the increasing number of French films shown without English subtitles: “I’ve been coming here for 20 years, and the siege mentality gets worse and worse.”

Aside from its determination to stay international and not become what scoffers call “a dog-and-pony show for Hollywood,” what sets Montreal apart from Toronto and gives it a distinctive character is that it’s the only Class A competitive film festival in North America recognized by the International Federation of Film Producers Assn., putting it on a par with the European big four of Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Moscow. Which is where we the jury rejoin the picture.

Their resumes notwithstanding, the jurors turned out to be a genial and good-humored bunch, constitutionally averse to taking themselves too seriously. On the average each member had been on half a dozen panels (Guglielmo Biraghi had been on that many in a single year) and it was a source of some amusement to find what one of them called “a jury virgin” in their midst.

The chairman, Jeanne Moreau, had previously headed juries in Cannes, Berlin, New Delhi, Avoriaz in France and Monte Carlo. At once spontaneous, conscientious and playful (novelist Nadine Gordimer, a fellow judge at Cannes, called her personality “an unlikely combination, at once imperious and lovable”), Moreau set an admirable tone for the proceedings.

“Judging isn’t protecting yourself from emotion,” she said at a press conference. “How can you approach a film coldly? You have to open up and be ready to receive. Cinema is the mirror of the world.”

Judging soon settled into a complete routine. Each morning the seven of us would rendezvous at the lovely circa 1912 Cinema Imperial for a double bill that began at 9 a.m. and was broken in half by a coffee break at an adjoining festival office. Not only did we always sit in the same blocked off row, such was the force of habit that we ended up almost always occupying the same seats.

Because gossiping to outsiders about what we liked or disliked was understandably forbidden, being on a jury encourages a sense of removal from the rest of the festival. Not for us is knowing the hot films or keeping tabs on what everyone is saying that is criticalfor a working journalist. Locked into a kind of monastic seclusion, we became dependent on each other for companionship and stimulation.

That traveling-in-a-bubble factor creates one of the most satisfying aspects of jury life, the sense of bonding among members that begins, probably in much the way it did for the O.J. Simpson jurors, in a camaraderie of misery.

For while it’s a given of festival life that walking out on endless, pointless and uninvolving films is not only permissible but essential to maintain a semblance of mental health, if you are on a jury you absolutely, positively cannot leave. As we suffered together during those films that were trying beyond belief, we identified strongly with each other, not to mention a character in one competition film who screams, “Art takes sacrifice” as a group of prostitutes empties chamber pots on his head. Sacrifice, indeed.

Part of the reason journalists and audience members can leave but we couldn’t is because what a jury does matters. Reviews and public cheers and hisses come and go, but awards last and often have a considerable effect on the careers of the films in competition as well as the people who make them.

This was something everyone in our group implicitly understood. We were serious, we were professional, and we worked so assiduously that we may have been the first jury in Montreal history to spend considerably more time in meetings than at parties.

While some juries get together only once, to take a final vote, the seven of us met for hours-long sessions every other day. Because Moreau did not want anyone to experience frustration at being unheard, we discussed each film at length, thoroughly airing our likes and dislikes, pulling apart and dissecting what we loved as well as what we didn’t.

Familiar with the acrimony that can attend similar discussions at critics organizations, I was impressed by the intelligence and tolerance of the group and how willing everyone was to acknowledge flaws in their favorites and explore unfamiliar opinions. As jurors sipped cups of black coffee and talked through clouds of cigarette smoke about life, literature, the theater and film, our meetings resembled those vivid Parisian cafe conversations that were a staple of the classic French New Wave films of the 1960s.

Enhancing that sensation was the fact that the discussions, excursions into both Spanish and English notwithstanding, were often in the language the jury as a whole was most comfortable in, which turned out to be French. Yes, everyone understood English and was happy enough to translate what I didn’t understand, and, yes, this kind of immersion experience markedly improved my comprehension during the course of the festival. But still it was disheartening to represent American parochialism by being the only juror who wasn’t bilingual at the very least.

When it came time for the jury’s final meeting, the thoroughness of our previous sessions paid considerable dividends. Not only because we had already eliminated many of the least worthy contenders but also because we had gained a respect for each other’s opinions that mitigated against the kind of going down with the ship fanaticism that had doomed other juries to deliberations that lasted till early in the morning.

Instead, within the space of a couple of hours, we very smoothly allocated the seven awards (plus two for shorts) within our power. Because none of the 21 features turned out to be a life-changing masterpiece that insisted on its preeminence, we were faced instead with the task of distributing the awards in a sensible manner among the films that we felt were strongest.

The top prize, the augustly named Grand Prix of the Americas, went to a British film, “Different for Girls,” that convincingly brought the conventions of romantic comedy to the rarely seen world of transsexuals. The film had its problems, but the core relationship, beautifully acted by Steven Mackintosh and Rupert Graves, was beyond reproach.

In our most Solomonic move, we split the festival’s runner-up award, the Special Grand Prix of the Jury, between two very different films. “Un Air De Famille,” directed by France’s Cedric Klapisch, was a hilarious, perfectly pitched comedy about a feuding family that also won the People’s Choice Award as the festival’s most popular film. It shared the jury prize with an elusive, elliptical, beautifully shot Japanese film called “Sleeping Man,” a small work that charmed us with its determination to be, as someone put it, “off-, off-, 100 times off-Broadway.”

That final meeting, and the satisfaction we all took in being as fair as we could, underlined what I came to appreciate most about jury service. It was the rare sense of being part of a community that believes in film, that cares deeply enough about the medium to put in the effort necessary to reward good work. So much of the film business, for actors, writers, directors and producers as well as for critics, is frustrating and adversarial that having the opportunity to work closely together for the common good was more satisfying than I could have imagined.

Several hours after the public awards ceremony, as I was headed out for a late-night bagel run (Montreal has the world’s best), I found myself alone in an elevator with one of the filmmakers involved with “Sleeping Man.” He looked at me and gravely said, “Thank you. It is a great honor. We did not expect it.”

Louis Malle, I think, would have understood how I felt.